1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an anti-fraud apparatus and method for credit cards, and particularly to an apparatus and method for rapidly and effectively recognizing authenticity of credit cards having an identifying logo such as VISA, in order to provide safety of use and prevent credit card fraud's illegal use.
2. Related Art
With consumer spending patterns changed, credit cards are very popular in shopping. According to the statistics, each of the credit card users may have more than one credit card and at least one VISA credit card. Members of VISA are separated worldwide in more than 150 countries, and over 1.3 billion people use Visa credit cards. Credit cards provide the function that transactions can be paid without cash. However, a serious problem to card issuing banks is the forged card problem. Card forgers are organized in globalization and have a mature skill in forging credit cards. They can forge every feature of a real VISA credit card and can illegally get real VISA credit card information by colluding a banker to get information of the credit card or by colluding a manufacturer to make a lot of forged credit cards, which leads to lost huge money in transaction.
Nowadays, there are many ways to prevent illegal use of VISA credit cards. Cashing operators rely on conventional methods to recognize the reality of VISA credit cards, but it is difficult to successfully recognize what differences are between forged VISA credit cards and real VISA credit cards. In other words, card forgers, first, bulkily forge VISA credit cards of same anti-fraud features like real VISA credit cards including the same color and the same graphic designs on the front face, but no card numbers on the front face neither cardholder's information is not forged on the rear face; moreover, card forgers further get card information by illegally recording a real VISA credit cards; the card information is recorded in a magnetic strip on the rear face of the credit card including a related card number, identification name, expiration dates, and other requiring identification codes. Then, card forgers copy the information on the front and rear faces of the forged VISA credit cards. However, information recorded in such forged VISA credit card does not match the representing cover of the card itself; for instance, information belongs to issuing bank A is recorded in a credit card released by issuing bank B. As a result, cashing operators are hard to recognize a VISA credit card by whatever features shown through fluorescence or comparison between real and fake card numbers. Obviously, conventional anti-fraud methods focus on single comparison (card number) by same features in every VISA credit card (The graphic designs). Therefore, conventional anti-fraud methods cannot effectively recognize a real VISA credit card because card forgers have a mature skill in forging credit cards. So, probability of success in illegally using forged credit cards is still very high.